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Donald Trump’s top economic officials vowed to press ahead with bruising tariffs on imports from around the world, rejecting fears of a looming recession as investors braced for new turmoil in financial markets.
In a blitz of television interviews on Sunday morning, Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, defended Trump’s ultra-protectionist trade policies as a necessary overhaul of global commerce and dismissed last week’s brutal sell-off in equity prices.
They also suggested additional levies on imports from a wide range of countries, that are set to take effect on Wednesday, would not be delayed. These are on top of a 10 per cent “baseline” tariff implemented on Saturday that has hit most imported goods.
“He announced it, and he wasn’t kidding. The tariffs are coming, of course they are,” Lutnick told CBS on Sunday, adding that there was “no postponing” the levies.
“The president needs to reset global trade.”
Top US officials said that, since Trump announced his new tariff plan last Wednesday in the Rose Garden of the White House, more than 50 countries had been in touch with the administration to seek negotiations to ease the tariffs.
But while they left the door open to talks, they were sceptical that a succession of deals could be reached quickly that would lead to a widespread rollback of the US tariffs.
“It’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks . . . we’re going to have to see what the countries offer and whether it’s believable,” Bessent said, speaking to NBC.
“After 20, 30, 40, 50 years of bad behaviour, you can’t just wipe the slate clean.”
The political pressure on Trump and his team over the tariff plans has mounted rapidly. The big drop in US equities last week has caused Democrats to sharpen their attacks on the administration and even some Republicans to recoil at the White House’s trade agenda.
On Friday, Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell warned that the tariffs being set by Trump risked delivering both higher inflation and slower growth to the world’s largest economy, revealing concern at the US central bank.
China’s move to retaliate against the latest round of US tariffs with its own levies on American goods further raised fears about the fallout.
But Bessent denied that financial markets or the economic outlook would be hit by long-term adverse effects. “There doesn’t have to be a recession,” he said.
The levies are a “one-time price adjustment”, he added, and Americans would not be too disturbed by the volatility on Wall Street.
“Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week?” Bessent said.
“Americans who want to retire right now, Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”
However, Lawrence Summers, a former US treasury secretary under Democratic president Bill Clinton, warned that “more turbulence” was likely to hit markets unless Trump changed course.
“Until the president recognises that this is a very serious error that is likely to have very adverse consequences, I think it’s likely to make things very difficult,” Summers told ABC.
“I think people are right to hold off on making big new purchases, businesses are right to be cautious. People are right to want to hold cash. What we need is a reversal of these policies, and until we have a reversal, I think we’re going to have a real problem.”
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